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Showing posts from February, 2014

Remote Teaching, Distance Learning, Team Teaching or Blended Learning?

Some time ago, I was asked to be a feature speaker at TEC14, the Teacher Education Conference taking place at the moment in Hyderabad, India . My presentation is after lunch ( 06.30 in Montevideo), and I will be presenting virtually. Because of this, the organisers asked me to make a recording of the presentation in case the connection fails, so here it is: Remote Teaching, Distance Learning, Team Teaching or Blended Learning? from Graham Stanley Due to a lack of of qualified and experienced teachers in Uruguay, English is being taught in primary classes all across the country via video conferencing, using teachers from elsewhere (including Argentina, the Philippines and Mexico). Because there are two teachers, a classroom teacher (CT) and a remote (RT), a new type of methodology is being developed that combines elements of distance learning, team teaching and blended learning, but which also requires a unique approach.  Read more about the Plan Ceibal English project h

The Plan Ceibal English lesson plans

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One of the ways the Plan Ceibal English programme is able to work is through the use of a specially-written lesson plan that allows the (generally non-English speaking) classroom teacher ( CT ) to follow what the remote teacher ( RT , the English teacher) is teaching in Lesson A, and also that allows her to carry out the practice activities in the follow-up lessons B & C, when she is alone with the children. As Jeremy Harmer mentioned after his visit and observation of a remote class: The English lessons in Plan Ceibal look (as far as I can see) pretty much like most Young Learner English lessons. They include monsters and songs, basic grammatical patterns, the sort of vocabulary you'll find in most general English coursebooks, and scripts (with quite a lot of Spanish thrown in) to guide the distance teacher. Objectives slide from the Week 1 lesson plan The lesson plans are similar to the kind of lesson scripts you can find in some published course-books. They in

Training for Ceibal English classroom teachers

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Claudia from Plan Ceibal addressing classroom teachers in Artigas In preparation for the next expansion of the Plan Ceibal English project (we are going to be moving from teaching 1,000 classes a week to 2,000 from March/April 2014), we have started a series of o rientation courses for classroom teachers. The first of these took place in the north-west of Uruguay, in Rivera and Artigas (see picture left), near the border with Brasil. One thing that's special about this project is that the classroom teachers who take part in the project are all volunteers. They are not forced to join and participate in the primary English programme. Fortunately, there have been no shortage of classroom teachers willing to join so far, and the project has benefited from word-of-mouth from participating classroom teachers and the overwhelming positive feedback from kids and parents. The orientation course format used to be two days, but has been reduced to one day because it was felt t